POP VIEW

POP VIEW; THE DARK SIDE OF PETER PAN

By Stephen Holden

Published: September 13, 1987

FROM ELVIS PRESLEY TO Michael Jackson: In the space of a month, the two most enigmatic icons of modern American pop have spawned back-to-back media frenzies that have an eerie symmetry.

Early August saw the further deification of Elvis Presley on the 10th anniversary of his death. The man who brought aggressive sexuality to the center of popular music was remembered as an unofficial American monarch, our one and only show-business ''King,'' who died of his own earthly excesses. No sooner had his commemoration ended than the drums started beating for the reappearance of Michael Jackson, the delicate, androgynous man-child whose mystique revolves around a transcendence of the body. If Elvis Presley was modern pop's symbolic king, Michael Jackson is surely its symbolic ''savior,'' an ascetic angel-sprite to whom Elizabeth Taylor, E. T. and Jesus seem to represent equally divine ideals.

''Bad,'' Mr. Jackson's first album in nearly five years, arrived in record stores on the same day that CBS broadcast a half-hour prime-time promotional special, ''Michael Jackson - The Magic Returns,'' featuring the Martin Scorsese-directed music video of the title song. In this 20-minute mini-movie, the first of the album's several music videos, the star imperiously rebuffs the glorification of outlaw behavior by black inner-city youth. Filmed mostly in black and white, with gritty streetwise dialogue by Richard Price and direction by Mr. Scorsese that reprises the mood of ''Mean Streets,'' this video is heavily tinged with the star's disturbing mixture of messianic pretension, rampant paranoia and narcissism.

In it Mr. Jackson portrays a refined prep-school student returning on a vacation from New England to his New York ghetto neighborhood. Arriving at his tenement home, he finds his old teen-age buddies lounging on the building's front steps. After they challenge him to prove that he is still ''bad,'' he agrees to participate in a subway robbery. But at the very last minute, he foils the assault on an old man and turns on the gang, shouting rhetorical questions about good and evil and the meaning of the word ''bad.''

During the harangue, the black-and-white film turns to color, and the deserted subway station becomes the set for a rainbow-hued, singing-and-dancing extravaganza in which Mr. Jackson triumphantly struts his loose-limbed prowess as a theatrical rock hoofer. Then, in a final tense moment, we're back in black-and-white hell, as Mr. Jackson faces the gang leader eye to eye. Will they fight? No, it turns out. They solemnly shake hands. Good has triumphed over bad.

While this mini-movie is a technically much-improved variation of ''Beat It,'' the landmark music video from his 1982 megahit album ''Thriller,'' in which Mr. Jackson's spiritual powers and kinetic energy transform a gang war into a dance, Mr. Jackson's demeanor in ''Bad'' is disquietingly, sadly bizarre. Even the song has a masochistic undertone, as the singer implores, ''If you don't like what I'm sayin'/ Then won't you slap my face?''

The dark side of Mr. Jackson's Peter Pan image is a self-flagellating, sullenly martyred outsider. In the years since ''Thriller,'' the star has surgically altered his appearance to produce this image. He has added an odd little cleft to his chin and made his lips thinner, desensualizing his features and blurring his racial heritage. In the ''Bad'' video, his skin has taken on an unnaturally ashen hue, and his heavy eye makeup and designer outfit of studded black leather present jarringly mixed messages. Capping the confusion is Mr. Jackson's speaking voice, which even at its most forceful sounds like a wounded whimper.

Amid all the hoopla surrounding the new album, the big question being asked by the music industry is whether the record can possibly exceed the popularity of ''Thriller,'' the best-selling record in history, with sales of 20 million copies in America and 38 million worldwide. By all accounts, Mr. Jackson is more obsessed than anyone with topping his own world record and dreams of selling 100 million copies of ''Bad.''

But unless Mr. Jackson's freakish new image proves irresistibly fascinating, ''Bad'' seems unlikely to match, or even approach, the sales performance of ''Thriller.'' One of the most innovative pop albums of modern times, ''Thriller'' summed up a moment in American pop cultural history when music videos were young and the science-fiction and horror movie cycles that inspired his videos hadn't run out of steam.

''Thriller'' was a pop-music answer to movie myths like ''E. T.'' and the ''Star Wars'' trilogy, offering romance and chills to kids of all ages. The songs on ''Bad'' break no new ground either stylistically or in their subject matter. The record lacks anything as snazzily audacious as ''Billie Jean.'' The new album's attempt to duplicate ''Billie Jean'' is a sourly misogynistic diatribe, ''Dirty Diana,'' directed at a predatory groupie who entraps the passive-aggressive narrator. And the song's reiteration of the word ''dirty'' to describe the vixen has a snidely priggish ring.

On the positive side, the album sounds like the $2 million it cost to make. Quincy Jones's richly dimensional production helps to turn songs with fragmentary, undistinguished lyrics into miniature soundtracks. And Mr. Jackson's ballads, ''I Just Can't Stop Loving You'' and ''Liberian Girl,'' are gorgeously sung and recorded reveries. On the uptempo songs, the gasping choked-up intensity of Mr. Jackson's acrobatic vocals, which leap, skid and pirouette with a dynamism that matches his dancing, infuses even the most banal lyrics with a charge of high Hollywood drama.

Having crafted a disturbing, otherworldly image that is more memorable than the peace-and-love pieties he dispenses, Mr. Jackson is gambling that in today's pop climate, a performer's personal iconographic power can give his nursery-rhyme sentiments the resonance of Scripture. But what Mr. Jackson conveys through his image is pretty forbidding, since the distinctions of sex, age and race - three of the principal obsessions of pop music - are all obliterated.

Posing as a benign, alien star-child stranded somewhere between Disneyland and the astral home of ''E. T.,'' he seems to want to demonstrate that spiritual salvation can only be attained by willfully evading reality and remaining a child. What a profoundly pessimistic message! For his self-transformation into a cartoonlike character of his own invention represents a rejection of the very humanity he has sought to help and enlighten through songs like ''We Are the World'' and ''Bad.''

What we are left with is a staggeringly talented, terror-struck symbol of our collective longing for an occult solution to human suffering. As Elvis Presley's role of ''king'' eclipsed his vitality as an entertainer, Michael Jackson has already begun to disappear into his role of pop's surrogate savior. If we think good thoughts and wish upon the stars hard enough, he would lead us to believe, maybe an extraterrestrial playmate will arrive in time to save us.